1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a printing system that performs a printing process by using a printing command, a printing control apparatus, a printing apparatus, a printing method, and a printing program.
2. Related Art
Improvement of printing resolution accompanies an increase in the size of printing data. This phenomenon is specifically remarkable when printing image data. In printing of image data, this tendency is specifically remarkable.
In the case of transmitting printing data from a printing control apparatus such as a computer to a printing apparatus such as a printer to print the printing data, if the time required for transmitting the data is longer than the time required for printing, the printing is interrupted. Therefore, the efficiency thereof is not good. In order to shorten the time required for transmitting the data, the data is transmitted by performing a compression process on the image data.
When printing using compressed image data, it is necessary to prevent image quality deterioration. For this reason, the data has been transmitted by using lossless compression as the compression process.
Meanwhile, as the compression process, there is also a lossy compression method. According to lossy compression, it can be generally expected that the compression ratio is great and the time required for transmitting the data is also shortened.
According to JP-A-2011-193210, there is disclosed a printing control apparatus in which both lossless compression and lossy compression are used.
In the lossy compression method, a predetermined data set is required when compressing or developing. In the case of JPEG, as the data set, Huffman table or the like is required as essential segment information.
If the data to be compressed is in a page unit, the size itself of the Huffman table does not become a problem. However, in the case of performing the printing process in which an intermediate code is generated by performing the printing process for every band of the page, a bit image to be transmitted becomes smaller, and the size of the Huffman table cannot be ignored.
That is, essentially, even when applying the process of lossless compression, in which an increase of the compression ratio can be expected, an increase in data transmission speed cannot be realized.